We have to stop state legislators from sneaking creationist and revisionist textbooks into public schoolsLouisiana's legislators are continuing their of the state's public school science classrooms. On 1 May, legislators killed a bill to repeal Louisiana's creationism law, the misnamed Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA).The law allows non-science to be snuck into science classrooms by...

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The bestselling author and digital pioneer shows his support for traditional bookshops.

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Soyinka, a Nobel laureate himself, also dismisses claims that Achebe was 'father of African literature'Calls for the late Chinua Achebe to be awarded a posthumous Nobel prize for literature have "gone beyond 'sickening'" and become "obscene and irreverent", Achebe's fellow Nigerian author – and 1986 Nobel laureate – Wole Soyinka has said.In a wide-ranging and passionate ,...

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The concerns of Orwells's 1946 essay remain notably relevant to the changes in written language wrought by the digital ageSome while ago, with reference to Orwell's essay on , I addressed the language of the internet, an issue that stubbornly refuses to go away. Perhaps now, more than ever, we need to consider afresh what's happening to English prose in cyberspace. To paraphrase Orwell, the...

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A lover's lament to personified 'Absence', the melancholy here is contained by a remarkably elegant rhetorical techniqueThis week's poem comes from a collection of sonnets, songs, pastorals, elegies and epigrams by . It's untitled, but numbered "Sonnet 30", and begins, aptly for a re-emergent poet, "Absence, I cannot say thou hid'st my light … "Sidney's poems, handwritten in...

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Ancient manuscripts on science and history are symbols of Africa's cultural heritage, say guardians of priceless libraryThere is a proverb in Timbuktu, the legendary medieval city in Mali's desert, that says: "The ink of a scholar is more precious than the blood of a martyr."What Ahmed Baba, the 16th-century intellectual who said it, would make of recent developments is hard to imagine....

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James Franco's adaptation of William Faulkner's novel is perhaps not entirely successful, but it's a brave and interesting attempt to pull off a film with a high degree of difficultyCritics of James Franco are getting worn down, if not yet fully convinced, by his sheer energy and productivity. The actor, writer, director and artist has now come to Cannes with a bold and high-minded new project: a...

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The award-winning actor is to revive her epic performance of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's longest poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, for a US premiereOnly a few weeks after her solo Broadway play The Testament of Mary closed early, Fiona Shaw has announced a return to New York, gets its American premiere in December.The staging of , which premiered in Epidaurus in Greece last year in January,...

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Crammed with gorgeous full-colour photographs and rich graphics, clear and concise writing, and large, easy-to-read font, this is the best chemistry primer I've ever read!Did you know that the bamboo lemur consumes enough cyanide daily to kill a human? ...that Paris green paint, which gets its colour from arsenic, was so toxic that it was used as a rat poison as well for painting masterpieces?...

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V nehostinném lesním prostředí žijí odvážní muži. Jeden druhému stojí věrně po boku ve chvílích bojů i v období zdánlivého klidu zbraní. Nepochybují o důležitosti úkolů, jež před nimi stojí, a spolehlivě plní rozkazy svého vůdce. Překáží-li v cestě jejich cílům nerozhodnost a slabost velitele, nastává čas jej vystřídat. Autorkou románu je česká...

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